06

We had a lovely Thanksgiving! But as soon as it passed, we began our Christmas celebration. From visiting Santa to decorating the house, it definitely feels like a cheerful time of year!

St. Nick (to read more about him, go here) stopped by last night. He brought a few goodies for Livy and Avery and he wrote a special letter to Avery about her inability to listen so we’ll see if her listening skills improve. Santa has brought the girls so much over the past years that I’m not sure what he could possibly come up with this year to bring them. His little elves are really having to think hard this year. On that same note, I think Avery is old enough to understand the joy of giving and how meaningful it is so perhaps we will start introducing a “giving day” where she can pick some things to gift for donations to other children.

I decided to go more towards natural elements for decorating this year. I ordered Burlap stockings that were handmade on Etsy and a beautiful burlap treeskirt with cute buttoms on Etsy as well. I also love a lot of greenery!

Last week I went to Anthropologie to do a little shopping and I noticed they had these cute faux snowglobes made out of Mason jars and other jars. They were $28 per jar and while I love a splurge from Anthropologie, I couldn’t justify the expense because I wanted a lot of them. I had a lot of the stuff needed to make these already at home and ran to Michaels to get the snow glitter and more jars. I made a grouping for the kitchen with only Christmas trees and I made a grouping for our family room. I think they turned out really cute! And considering I made 10 of them, that’s $280 worth of faux snowglobes for only about $30-40 worth of supplies. The most expensive part was the Lennox trees but I used a 40% off coupon from Michael’s.
Supplies (jars, cooltouch glue gun (don’t want to burn yourself!!), trinkets or village christmas trees, snow glitter, OH! and apple cider for sipping while you work) :
One of my groupings:

She moves too quickly! The lighting was low and I couldn’t get a good shot of her admiring the tree so it’s a bit blurry (and I was too lazy to go get my other lens):

Last weekend, we had a very nice weekend at home and I promised Avery that she could decorate a Gingerbread house over the weekend. She couldn’t wait! She’s been wanting to do this for weeks. We picked up a house from Whole Foods. Unfortunately, they didn’t have a kit to go with it so I went to their bakery and they packaged some frosting for me and we picked out some fun treats to decorate it with a la carte.
I love how hard she is concentrating here. This one was taken with my iphone:
The finished product turned out pretty cute! I straightened out the roof shingles just a tad:

12

A few days before we left to Shiner for Christmas, we wanted to celebrate Christmas with Dee here at home! She opened her gift and Avery got to open the gift Dee gave her. We absolutely love Dee and wanted this to be a very special Christmas for her. Avery loved her Cabbage Patch that she got from Dee and gave the baby kisses (notice the wet babydoll face). She also got some bottle to feed her baby and decided to try them out herself